Munki, Monolithic Imaging, and Microsoft Office 2016 Volume License Serializer

If you have Macs that were cloned from an already-activated system (either via monolithic imaging, or one-off machines that were migrated or experienced hardware failure) you will find that your Office 2016 activation is broken. You will also find that Munki doesn’t know it needs to re-run the Office 2016 serializer since a receipt already exists for it.

I was able to work around this by adding a couple scripts to the serializer’s pkgsinfo. First I added an installcheck_script that looks for a file in /Users/Shared which contains the serial of the computer on which Office was activated. If it doesn’t match the computer’s serial, or if it doesn’t exist, then the serializer package will run. Then we use a postinstall_script to write the serial number of the current computer to this file so we know it’s been activated on this machine and doesn’t need to run again.

installcheck_script:

#!/bin/bash

machineserial=`system_profiler SPHardwareDataType | awk '/Serial/ {print $4}'`

activatedserial=`cat /Users/Shared/.office2016activatedserial`

if [[ $machineserial == $activatedserial ]]; then

exit 1

fi

postinstall_script:

#!/bin/bash

system_profiler SPHardwareDataType | awk '/Serial/ {print $4}' > /Users/Shared/.office2016activatedserial